Make Your Own “Prima” Flowers

If you have the time, you may want to try your hands at making your own “Prima” flowers. These flowers were inspired by Jules. You can watch how she makes these beautiful flowers here and here.

These flowers got a little bit of dimension and is not flat. So when do you use these flowers? We reckon that you can use these flowers on your projects if you are putting your projects in a frame box. Alternatively, make much smaller flowers so that it will be able to fit into your album.

What do you need to have before you start?

Basically, you need papers. Decide on the color of your flowers and choose the desired paper and design. We made a pink and an orange flower, so now we decided to make a purple flower, hence we chose this piece of scrapbooking paper. If you watch Jules video, you will notice that she makes her flowers using either a Retro flower punch from EK Success (5 petals) or Tim Holtz flower die cut catridge (6 petals). For us, we cut the petals freehand. We cut 3 pieces of the large size petal and 3 pieces of the medium size petal. So in total we got 6 layers. You can cut 3 more pieces of a small size petal so it will give your flower a total of 9 layers. Either way, it’s fine.

We cut 2 pieces of slighly oval shapes from a green card stock for the leaves.

You would require a stylus to curl the petals. Alternatively, you can use the cap of a pen like what Jules did. Or you can use the back of a letter opener like what we did.

Glossy Accents from Ranger Ink is used to complete the flower.

Use a mouse pad to curl the petals. Someone else commented that she tried to curl the petals in her palm and it worked for her as well. So if curling on the mouse pad is too difficult, you can try using your palm. More practice and you will get the hang of it.

Additional materials that you might want to use are chalk inks or glimmer mists. We used chalk inks to ink the petals and leaves to create some shade. This was done before we started to curl the petals.

Step 1:

Cut your petals using a die cut machine, punch or simply do it free hand. 3 large pieces, 3 medium pieces and 3 smaller pieces (optional). In this project, we omitted the 3 smaller pieces.

Step 2:

Sprinkle a little water on the petals so it will be easier to curl them and keep them in that shape when it is dried. Just a little will do. Too much water and you will find that it will be very difficult to curl the petals and you might even tear it.

Step 3:

Use your stylus or any rounded tip and press down on the ends of the petals. Using the same pressure, make circular movements to curl the petals. This will create some folds or lines on the petal. This is what we want – a little tattered look. Do this on the mouse pad.

Step 4:

Then use your stylus and draw in from the center of the petal to the center of the flower. This action will draw the petal upwards and towards the center of the flower.

Step 5:

Do the same for all the petals until you get one as shown below. You may want to use your hands to curl the petals into a ball as shown below as well if your petals do not curl as much as you want it to be.